• Splasher
  

  4 hours playtime

  20 of 47 achievements

This is a platformer. You start off only being able to run and jump, but near the end of the first level, you get the ability to shoot water (removes paint from a surface and damages small enemies). After seven levels, you unlock red ink (stick to a surface and paralyze enemies), and once you get past level 14, you finally get to fire yellow ink (bounce off a surface–higher than your normal jump height–and can push enemies). There are twenty two levels in the whole game.

Each level has seven hostages: six requiring a small detour through a short platforming challenge, and the last requiring you to get 700 gold drops in the level. The detours for the main hostages are short enough that you can always see said hostages on screen simply by playing through the level (so you won’t have to worry about doing any aimless wandering), and all hostages carry a sign to let you know where they are in relation to the others (like the letters in Donkey Kong Country or Super Lucky’s Tale). Sometimes, one of these hostages will be in a vortex that sends you to a “quarantine zone” where you need to kill all the enemies to free the hostage. They start off as just waves of enemies, but luckily, the game eventually realizes how boring this is and adds more platforming challenges to them, even getting to the point where the enemies are in their own room and you need to reach a switch that kills them for you. As for the final hostage in each level, while you usually end up with slightly more than 700 gold drops at the end of each level, it’s very rare for something to give you only one drop, so missing one thing still means you’d have to go through the whole level again. I only missed two hostages in the entire game (and both were the last ones in their respective levels): level 3 had a large, open room with a small fork in the bottom right that led to a gold-drop wheel, and level 9 had a switch to kill the first two turret enemies (you get around 10 gold drops when an enemy dies), and I only had to replay those two levels once to see what I missed. My only issue with this is that the reward for rescuing all the hostages is just another speed-run option when there are already two available (on top of time-attack mode for each level), so if you reach the end of a level and realize you missed one, I wouldn’t recommend going back unless you’re trying to get all the achievements.

As for the rest of the game, it’s pretty good. The game does introduce various traps, but they usually show up in at least two or three different levels so it doesn’t feel gimmicky. The game is really easy before you get the red ink, but later levels have enough reasonable challenge to make up for it (though the two wind levels are definitely difficulty spikes). Mid-air movement does have some momentum, and it does take a bit to get used to, but it’s still manageable. Some hostages are placed in devious positions so that while you’ll certainly see them on your first pass, you’ll see them get killed and have to kill yourself in order to have a real attempt at rescuing them. Of course, most of them are in fair positions (sometimes even being a drop in difficulty compared to the rest of the level), and as mentioned previously, there isn’t much point to rescuing all of them anyway.

There were a couple other problems I had with the game. The train level starts off fine, but when you enter the train, it has a foreground object obscure what’s in the cart until after you enter, meaning you have less time to react to what’s in there. This level also doesn’t have a second checkpoint until after you get past the train, making it the longest you have to go between checkpoints in the game (it’s not really hard as much as it’s annoying since you have to redo all of that for getting hit once). Also, there are three or four flood levels, and just like with Ori, the flood has rubber-banding AI: no matter if you stop for a few seconds to collect the gold-drop wheel or rush past it, the acid will always be the same distance from you when you reach certain pre-checkpoint landmarks. I don’t know why developers do this: it’s easily noticeable and disingenuous to those of us who want a set challenge. If you want your game to appeal to rage-quitters, at least be straightforward about it instead of pulling an Extra Credits and pretending like they overcame a much harder challenge than they did.

Still, despite its shortcomings, I’d recommend this game if you like platformers. It’s slow to start and can be cheap with its hostage positions, but the majority of the game is well polished and challenging.